Every week, our panel of sports fans discusses a topic of the moment. For today's conversation, Patrick Hruby (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic), Hampton Stevens (writer, ESPN and The Atlantic), and Jake Simpson (writer, The Atlantic), discuss the return of the pro football refs.

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Indeed, that may have been the biggest lesson of the NFL's disastrous—debacle-ous?—lockout of its game officials: the knowledge that the striped shirts we usually love to hate are the only thing standing between professional football as we know it and Vince McMahon's Rollerball. (They're also the only thing standing between the league as a gambling paradise and Cleveland-Baltimore as worse bet than Facebook shares). We want Hochuli on that wall. We need Hochuli on that wall. And not just to blame when things go south for our favorite teams.

Still, there were other takeaways, too. A labor union can still whip plutocratic management in a contract negotiation provided that said union has actual leverage: for one, the scab refs proved that their regular counterparts are basically irreplaceable; moreover, the regular officials are part-time employees, with other careers and income on the side, which meant that unlike recently locked-out NFL players, they could afford to walk away from the table. We learned that politicians can be pandering hypocrites—more precisely: we got a refresher course—and also learned that while the league peddles its concussion lawsuits-driven, newfound concern for player safety with the Come-to-Jesus fervor of a cable televangelist, that concern does not outweigh the owners' desire to stick it to their gametime cops over a few million bucks in traditional pension payments.

Hampton, what will you remember about the referee lockout? Will it affect the NFL going forward?

–Patrick

Pain. Disgust. Schadenfreude. Disbelief, too. It's amazing that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell isn't being pounded ruthlessly and endlessly for a screw-up this big and dumb. The lockout of officials, a self-inflicted wound that got infected, swelled, and finally popped in Seattle on Monday night was a colossal, apocalyptic, cosmic fail. Nobody in the history of sports has ever screwed up worse, and done it for less of a reason. Ever. Certainly nothing any player has done off the field, in any sport, has done so much senseless damage to the integrity of a game. There's never been an arrest for drunk driving, a gambling scandal, or a "bounty" that has hurt pro football a fraction as much as the commissioner just did.

Lord knows, there has never been another instance of bad officiating that comes close to the gruesome spectacle we've seen this year. Forget Jeffrey Maier in the ALCS or a phantom fifth down helping Colorado beat Mizzou. Those were blown calls. Mistakes. Sports leagues live with them. Big ones become fan lore. With the NFL's replacement ref fiasco, it was a league's worth of bad officials. It was a dozen bad calls per game. Worse, there were a dozen more that were missed. The players caught on—quickly. They bent and stretched rules, held, clipped, and the league became an exercise in macabre fascination, like watching the island society in Lord of Flies devolve into chaos.

Oh, but wait. The NFL not only deliberately, significantly downgraded their own product, almost daring fans to find reasons the games can't be trusted. The greater stupidity isn't even that the whole fight was over chicken feed. True, America's shimmering example of sports entertainment excellence, a billion-dollar juggernaut, made itself a global laughingstock over few thousand dollars in salaries per year, turning their precious shield into a symbol of bumbling confusion.

But you know what's the most grievous, mind-bendingly gut-wrenchingly stupid thing of all? They did it—debased our game, toying with the affections of millions—to fight a union whose members all have other, full-time jobs. That's a special, deeper level of dumb.

Jake, help me out. My dominant emotion right now is confusion. Maybe I'm wrong, and Goodell is brilliant. Maybe he created the replacement ref fiasco as a Machiavellian ruse to get fans talking about something, anything besides concussions. Either that, or we should fry an egg on Roger's forehead to see what sticks, because that guy has got to be coated with Teflon. You're the booth official this week, man. You get the last word. Mine is: help!

–Hampton

I wish I had a positive spin to put on this story, Hampton, a panacea for the three-week eyesore we just witnessed. But there isn't one, at least not one that I can see. The NFL decided it was going to "win" the labor negotiations with the referees, just as it did with the players last year. The owners and Goodell were willing to sacrifice the short-term integrity of the game for a long-term leg up in all their labor disputes—simply put, lose one negotiation and you open the door to lose more down the road. I spoke with Tulane University sports law professor Gabe Feldman about the ref issue, and he said that a large part of it came down to "the NFL's belief that the players and the refs are not bigger than the league." And though the NFL had to compromise more it might have wanted because of Monday night's fiasco, it still got what it really wanted—starting in 2017, the refs will have a 401(K) plan like every other league employee, rather than a pension plan.

If there's one silver lining from this lockout, it's that we won't remember it in 20 years. Had the replacement refs been in place for a full season, the Packers-Seahawks ending might not have been the low point by the end of it all (that would be a player getting seriously injured, like Darrius Heyward-Bey almost was). But this will fade into the tableau of league history, like the players' strike of 1987 or Spygate. Did you know that the league used replacement refs in Week 1 of the 2001 season? Until last week, I didn't either. Scratch that—I once knew, but had forgotten because the NFL marched on and we all started caring about something else.

The sour taste of this lockout may take a little longer to go away, especially if you're a Packers fan. But come December, or January, or Feb. 3 in New Orleans, the focus of football fans will have shifted fully to the 22 men on the field wearing helmets. That, at least, we can look forward to.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.